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Monday, May 7, 2012

The Left, cognizant of the threat Marco Rubio poses to the panderer-in-chief's ability to capture Hispanic votes in November, continues its efforts to smear his reputation any way they can, no matter how ludicrous.

The Washington Post attacked Rubio last October (see my posts here and here), claiming Rubio had falsified his family history. While that article was thoroughly debunked at the time, it seems that liberals are not willing to drop this particular line of attack just yet.
Unfortunately for Rubio's opponents, facts are on his side. Yale Professor Dr. Carlos Eire has written a moving article, full of excellent historical detail, for The New Republic in defense of Rubio on the issue of Cuban Americans in exile from their homeland (hat tip: my friends over at Babalú Blog, who you really should be reading):

One of the hardest challenges faced by those of us who have lived under tyrants is the task of explaining dictatorships to Americans. The hardest point of all to explain is that a lousy despot can often be succeeded by an even worse monster, and that those who flee from them sometimes become exiles two or three times over. It’s a subject that conventional American wisdom has long reduced to a simplistic and vacuous either/or formula: Surely, no Cuban could hate both Batista and Fidel. This is why so many Americans—even educated journalists—have trouble grasping that it would never occur to most Cuban exiles to quibble over any Cuban’s year of departure from the island.
The truth is this: Marco Rubio’s parents left Cuba during the Batista dictatorship, hoping to someday return to a free and prosperous Cuba. Unfortunately, Fidel Castro proved far worse than his predecessor, so, after a relatively brief and tentative attempt to resettle in post-Batista Cuba, his family realized that their dream could not be fulfilled. Faced with the grim realities of Castrolandia, which they tested out first-hand, they decided to remain in the United States, never ceasing to yearn for their homeland, ever frustrated over the enslavement of their nation.Any Cubans returning from the United States in the early 1960s, like the Rubio family, could not help but notice that life in Cuba had become intolerable for anyone who was not a die-hard communist. I know so many Cubans who left the island during Batista’s dictatorship that I cannot even count their number; every one of them who returned to post-Batista Cuba—save one of my relatives who was a communist and loved Fidel—found it necessary to flee to the United States once again after getting a taste of the Castroite totalitarian state. I have one cousin who lived in the United States before 1959 and returned to Cuba only to find himself thrown in prison for nearly twenty years, simply for opposing the Castro regime. Worse than that, his father was imprisoned and tortured too, just because he had a renegade son.
The fears that drove Marco Rubio’s parents to flee Castro's Cuba, then, were very real—indeed, they were exactly the same fears that drove out others who had never before left their homeland...
So I don't see why it is considered a distortion for Marco Rubio to speak of himself and his family as political exiles. Anyone who flees from oppression—willingly or not—and fears returning to their homeland is an exile. The fact that the dictator you first fled was toppled by an even worse dictator who makes it impossible for you to return does not in any way cancel that out. Indeed, to deny that fact is to deny Cubans, who have a century-long tradition of shuttling back and forth between their oppressive homeland and the United States, their history: Regrettably, they have always had a dictator to flee...